


Bury the Dead

by Vulgaritar



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-28 07:41:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8437099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vulgaritar/pseuds/Vulgaritar
Summary: On Halloween a ghost rises to haunt the living.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Please have this very short, very un-beta'd, holiday-inspired drabble.

Reaper isn’t so far gone that he doesn’t see the irony of visiting his own grave on Halloween. He might have even been amused if the circumstances of his undeath weren’t so bitter.

The date is chosen because of its convenience, not because it fits the narrative. The cemetery would be closed to vandals and unattended teenagers with nothing better to do than try to raise the dead with new age witch books and cheap candles. It affords him privacy. After the sun sets Reaper steps out without his mask, and no one he passes on the street spares his mutilated flesh and too-many eyes a second look. Halloween had always been his favorite holiday.

He walks to the cemetery and passes through the iron-wrought fence in a whisper of smoke. Even in the dark it’s not hard to find his “grave”; the statue that serves as his headstone is among the largest of the plots, even if it is nowhere near as lavish as Morrison’s.

But then it’s not like Jack is even using it, what with his being infuriatingly alive and whole. Somewhere.

As for the final standing testament to Gabriel Reyes, a life spent serving humanity in the most dangerous, thankless capacity imaginable, his mere image remains a source of contention. Reaper wonders how long his granite likeness has stood without a face, with missing fingers, with visible paint stains soaked into the stone. There’s a seam in the neck, probably from where the head had been bashed off and replaced. The caretakers must be done trying to keep up with people desecrating Gabriel’s resting place. How pitiful that he is denied peace and dignity even in death. There is a moment where Reaper considers his current objectives and feels more affirmed in them than ever.

An irregularity at base of the monument catches his eye. He notices a barren patch where the grass is dead and the dirt loosely packed down, but not enough to conceal the disturbance. Frowning, Reaper plunges his fingers into the cool earth. Something tangles around his knuckles as he digs. He drags it out and turns the thing over in his hand, shaking it clean, watching pieces of tied-together metal glint in the perimeter lights.

He’s never seen it before, not assembled like this, but he knows it immediately. Delight sparks in his chest. The lead wasn’t a dead-end after all: His prey has been here, as recently as within the last week.

“Leaving a trail? Bad move, cowboy. I taught you better.”

McCree was always prone to picking up garbage. As a fresh recruit they couldn’t get out the goddamn door without him stopping to pocket some crap he’d found. Small baubles, shiny rocks, animal bones and feathers, old coins, bullet casings, broken pieces of nothing – all that shit normal people had the sense to throw away, McCree hoarded like prized, confusing treasures. It annoyed Gabriel but he’d allowed it, thinking the memory triggers were part of some bizarre coping mechanism the kid needed to get through.

The junk accumulation slowed down as he got older, but Jesse never let the practice go. He drilled holes into his little totems, stringing the assorted bits of trash together like a memory sequence. He would pull them out on long flights and stare at them with the intensity of a man working out the greatest mysteries of the universe while wearing the vacant expression of an imbecile. When McCree fled Blackwatch the charms disappeared with him.

Reaper turns the discovery over in his hands. He can’t place most of the items connected on this one. He couldn’t possibly. McCree’s thought process when he selected his trinkets had always been arbitrary, some seemingly picked only because it was there at the same time he was. A few are obvious. A mouse skull, painted red around the edges: Blackwatch. Half of a dirty souvenir magnet came from the clusterfuck of an op they’d run out of an old theme park. The mangled remnants of a shotgun shell? Reyes had overlooked some cracked ammunition. The damn thing had exploded in the barrel, destroying a very expensive gun and almost his left hand. There are other things, like scraps of metal and cloth that aren’t distinguishable enough to trace back. Only McCree could tell-

Reaper stops, realizes how much thought and time he has invested into this idiocy, and shakes the echoes of nostalgia off.

Still, he can’t help but think about all the years McCree must have been hauling this shit around through his exile. Now this one gets left behind at the headstone of Gabriel Reyes like an offering. Or maybe an apology.

Reaper rejects it.

“Can’t run from your past, traitor,” he says like a promise. He clenches his fist around the rodent’s skull, ready to feel the satisfaction of destroying something McCree cares about, but just as the sharp points of bone and teeth begin cutting into his skin he gets an idea. His grip relaxes.

Reaper decides he can stand to teach his former protege one last lesson.

——–

At some point Jesse is going to have to consider taking care of his body.

That’s as alien a thought now as it was when he was running guns for the Deadlocks or kicking down doors with Blackwatch. He never thought he’d get old enough to have to worry about things like cholesterol or blood pressure or lung cancer. He can’t believe he’s 37 and a fugitive from about every law enforcement agency out there, but here he is, pushing open the door to his budget motel room, dropping a sack of greasy fries and a double cheeseburger on the table. He can’t immediately recall the last meal that hadn’t come from some roadside diner or fast food chain. Sometimes he gets pains in his heart for no reason.

The bounty hunters better hurry up if they want to get him before the coronary does.

His other parts may be getting old but McCree’s eyes are as sharp as ever, and if there’d been anything, _anything_ out of the ordinary to signal somebody had been in his room, he’d have caught it. All was normal outdoors, so the first hint of trouble comes alongside the realization that Jesse isn’t being hunted. No, the chase is over. His opponent is already on top of him, toying.

Sitting on the faded motel coverlet, caked with gravedirt, Jesse finds the mementos he’d buried in a cemetery a month back and three states over.

He doesn’t approach it, not at first. He retreats from the room and waits until he’s convinced nothing is timed to blow him up. Then he ventures back inside and sweeps for surveillance, spy equipment, explosives, or anything that just doesn’t seem right. He finds nothing.

It’s a long time before curiosity overtakes caution. His dinner is cold and on its way to seeping out the bottom of the paper bag when he finally goes over to the bed. Attached to the string of odds and ends Jesse finds a note written in a hand just as familiar to him as it was impossible.

McCree gathers his things and leaves the motel shortly after, aware that his stalker has probably left him to dangle on the hook but unwilling to sit still in case they change their mind. He doesn’t take the charm along. The message and all of its implications tug on his thoughts well after the town is a distant collection of lights in the stolen pick-up’s rearview.

_‘You can’t bury me, vaquero.’_


End file.
